Introduction

While Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) wasn’t quite the first service announced by AWS, once it did show up in 2006, it became the obvious cornerstone tool for many cloud deployments. EC2 faithfully mirrors the functionality of traditional on-premises data centers: you provision and launch virtual servers (known as instances) to run the same kinds of application workloads that would once have kept legacy servers busy. The fact that EC2 instances are more resilient and scalable and, often, cheaper than their on-premises cousins was just a happy bonus.

In the years since EC2 appeared, Amazon has introduced other compute tools aimed at providing the same end-user experience but through a simplified or abstracted interface. In this chapter, you’ll learn about how it all happens using EC2 and its more lightweight counterparts like Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, Docker (including via the Kubernetes orchestrator), and Lambda.